The Coming Storm

Forced Entertainment specialise in creating theatre that 'articulates and engages with the contemporary world', but their latest project The Coming Storm fails to be anything more than an interesting insight into the idiosyncracies of story-telling. As a show, it's rather dull and rather uninspired - a couple of nice moments are not enough in this muddled production. At the BAC.

In this new work international innovators Forced Entertainment tangle and cross-cut multiple stories to make a compelling and unstable performance. From love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow, personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies, and half-remembered novels bump into distorted fairytales. Using a method as inventive as it is absurd, six performers create, collaborate, ambush and disrupt this epic saga that is resolutely too big for the stage. The result is comical, contradictory and poignant; full of wrong-headed tricks, broken dances, sleazy drum interruptions and perfunctory piano accompaniment. Everything builds and everything shimmers. Everything teeters and everything trembles. Everything is reshaped and everything is cannibalised. The Coming Storm is Forced Entertainment at its best – trademark black humour, a collage of arresting images and an anarchic performance style.

In this latest project, the company expand their recent forays into narrative explored in the graphic novel picaresque Void Story, as well as in the roots of Artistic Director Tim Etchells’ fiction writing, especially the collection Endland Stories. This new performance involves a cast of six performers (the regular core team Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall and Terry O’Connor plus Phil Hayes who worked with the company on The Thrill of It All). Director and writer Tim Etchells are joined again by lighting designer Nigel Edwards and collaborating again with sound designer and composer John Avery, the new project will also feature live music for the first time in the group’s work.

Forced Entertainment specialise in creating theatre that 'articulates and engages with the contemporary world', but their latest project The Coming Storm fails to be anything more than an interesting insight into the idiosyncracies of story-telling. As a show, it's dull and rather uninspired - a couple of nice moments are not enough in this muddled production.

The Coming Storm is all about story-telling - and, as each performer tries to tell their stories and engage with each other's, various narratives unwind. Their efforts to interact with each other's often tall tales confuse rather than explain, often adding new tangents that create further complications to a show that struggles to say anything at all.

It's conceivable that that's the goal here - that Forced Entertainment want to dissect and complicate the story-telling process to the point at which it all becomes a bit pointless. Because, in the end, aren't stories fractured by their retelling? By being understood through different art forms, isn't each story losing an element of what makes it unique, even to the point of not being the same story any more at all? Potentially -and the discussion on what identifies a given story is an interesting one, but by making that argument literally (by fracturing their own narratives to the point of incomprehension), Forced Entertainment's resulting show is almost unwatchable.

Utilising various props, costume and set, Forced Entertainment take it in turns to snatch a microphone off of each other and try to tell a story, or talk about the art of telling stories. No story is ever told completely - often a performer will start a story, then be interrupted by any number of distractions from their fellow actors. There's a strong sense of improvisation, probably codified through devising into a specific set of vignettes, but the result doesn't really have any hook to hang onto. You can't quite shake the feeling that you're just watching six actors arguing with each other about what to show their captive audience - again, that may be how Forced Entertainment feel, but that doesn't mean that the result is particularly good.

It's conceivable that this started off as a good concept, and that the result is a disappointment. It certainly seems to be more about when these processes fail over when they succeed. But all that this rather renowned company end up displaying is a messy collection of decent moments - there are some lovely musical interludes, including a quirky sketch about a man hanging himself, but that's it.

Without meaning to be too derogatory, it's the kind of thing an amateur company could have put together - and would be derided for. I expected a lot more from Forced Entertainment, and would have thought that they could have done more with this idea, made a better show out of this concept. Instead, they seem to have floundered with their own artistic ideals and ended up presenting something highly unworthy of their name. Very, very disappointing.

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